Down, don, down

John Sutherland

• Decline of Donnish Dominion by A.H. Halsey
  Oxford, 344 pp, £40.00, March 1992, ISBN 0 19 827762 8
• Millikan’s School: A History of the California Institute of Technology by Judith Goodstein
  Norton, 317 pp, £17.95, October 1991, ISBN 0 393 03017 2

More did mean worse – although not quite in the way Kingsley Amis feared. He and his Black Paper colleagues misjudged what would happen to ‘standards’ after the expansionist Robbins Report. The British university product – the education of undergraduates and scholarly research – has never been better than it now is, nor its international reputation higher. In 1990, a poll of European participants in Erasmus gave top place in seven out of 11 mainstream academic subjects to a British university, Erasmus being a transfer credit scheme by which undergraduates can earn a home degree by study abroad. The brightest young European minds will be drawn magnetically to Britain. British universities continue to be major exporters to traditional Anglophone markets, sustaining an imperial authority long after Empire has vanished. Expatriate Britons and natives who have profitably studied in Britain will be found at leading departments everywhere in North America and Australasia.